Excerpt: David Barker, M.D., Ph.D., FRS is a Physician and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Southampton, UK and Professor in the Department of Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, US. Fifteen years ago, he showed for the first time that people who had low birth weight are at greater risk of developing coronary heart disease. He subsequently showed that they are also at greater risk of stroke, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. This led to the idea that these disorders originate through under nutrition in the womb and during infancy. In 1992, the British Medical Journal named this the “Barker Hypothesis”. It is now widely accepted. He recently joined the faculty at the Heart Research Center, OHSU, to study how nutrition and growth before birth and during early childhood alter the development of the heart.